performance

I have a fairly strong preference for choosing simple solutions over complex solutions, and using Oracle-supplied packaged over writing custom code – provided the difference in cost THere’(whether that’s in human effort, run-time resources, or licence fees) is acceptable. Sometimes, though, the gap between simplicity and cost is so extreme that a hand-crafted solution is clearly the better choice. Here’s an idea prompted by a recent visit to a site that makes use of materialized views and also happens to be licensed for the partitioning option.

While checking out potential scalability threats recently on a client system, I was directed to a time-critical task that was currently executing the same PL/SQL procedure 16 times (with different parameters) between 6:00 and 7:00 am; as the system went through its next phase of expansion the number of executions of this procedure was likely to grow. An interesting detail, though, was that nothing else was going on while the task was running so the machine (which had 6 cores) was running at 16% CPU.

An obvious strategy for handling the required growth target was to make sure that four (possibly 5) copies of the procedure were allowed to run concurrently. Fortunately the different executions were completely independent of each other and didn’t interfere with each other’s data, so the solution simply required a mechanism to control the parallelism. Conveniently 11gR2 gave us one.

A quick note, Expert Oracle RAC book co-written by me is available now: Expert Oracle RAC 12c. I have written about 6 chapters covering the RAC internals that you may want to learn :) I even managed to discuss the network internals in deep, after all, network is one of the most important component of a RAC cluster.

The first line of the table is the classic wait event and statistic views. The following lines are the metric views. The metric views were introduced in Oracle 10g.

Why Metrics are good

Metric views compute deltas and rates which hugely simplifying the ability to answer simple questions like “what is the I/O rate on my databases right now?” This question, before 10g, was surprisingly tedious to answer. To answer the question one would have to query v$sysstat for example:

If one is seeing waits for enq: TX – row lock contention then there could be a lot of reasons. One distinguishing factor is the lock mode. If the lock mode is exclusive (mode 6) then it’s most likely a classic row lock where two sessions are trying to modify the same row. On the other hand if the lock mode is share (mode 4) it’s typically going to be

One thing that I have found sorely missing in the performance pages of Enterprise Manager is latency values for various types of I/O. The performance page or top activity may show high I/O waits but it won’t indicated if the latency of I/O is unusually high or not. Thus I put together a shell script that shows latency for the main I/O waits

Anyone who has been around Oracle performance over the years knows the grief that hard parsing SQL queries can cause on highly concurrent applications. The number one reason for hard parsing has been applications that don’t use bind variables. Without bind variables queries that would otherwise be shared get recompiled because their text is different and Oracle treats them as different queries. Oracle addressed this issue with a parameter called cursor_sharing. The parameter cursor_sharing has three values

exact – the default

similar – replace literals with bind variables, if a histogram keep literal in place

force – replace literals with bind variables and use existing plan if it exists

Here is what the load looks like going from the default, exact, to the value force on a load of the same query but a query that doesn’t use bind variables:

Starting in 10g Oracle records both the CPU used by the instance as well as the load on the system in v$sysmetric. This is awesome as we can see how busy the system is and how much of the CPU Oracle is responsible for: